Like the deserts miss the rain
by Ann Smiley
Summary: In this AU the coverstone fell a little to the left. Claire and Daniel, two years later.


Like the deserts miss the rain

Title: Like the deserts miss the rain

Category: kidfic, original childhood, gen

Rating: PG

Warning: mentions of character death (nothing explicit)

Summary: In this AU, the coverstone fell a little to the left. Claire and Daniel, two years later.

A/N: Originally the start of a longer AU story that never quite got off the ground. Title from _Missing_ by Everything but the girl. Crossposted to LJ and dw (where my pen-name is less_star).

When Daniel Jackson was ten years old his mother stopped cleaning.

It was a gradual thing, and soon he couldn't say for certain when it had started. But one evening he was standing in their living room, looking for a clean shirt in the pile of laundry in the easy chair and it struck him that he hadn't seen his mother fold and put away laundry for weeks. She still went to the laundry room in the basement, but as soon as she was done she just left it.

Daniel looked around the small living room and the adjoining kitchen. The dinner table was covered with papers, work assignments from the students his mother tutored. A corner of the table held the empty takeout boxes that had been Daniels dinner. They had Chinese food or pizza for dinner nearly every night now, sometimes soup from a can, but most of their meals came in boxes.

His mother let him choose what to order. _We'll share, won't we, Daniel? It's lucky we like the same things._ Sometimes she set the table with plates, but not every night.

Daniel ate while Claire marked the papers quickly, her left-handed writing nearly illegible even after two years. She usually asked Daniel how school had been. He always told her everything was fine.

After dinner Daniel cleaned up and Claire went to lie on the couch, covered in the worn blanket they'd brought from Egypt. She curled her legs so Daniel could sit beside her. She picked up her book, the same one every night. It was an old, tattered paperback, barely held together by tape. "The Alexandria quartet" Daniel had noticed that she didn't read it straight through, but went back and forth, sometimes staring at the same page for hours. He thought he remembered his father reading from it. His parents had often read to each other. He remembered long, warm, lazy nights and his father's voice, the special one he used for reading aloud. He remembered his mother laughing.

"You can watch tv if you want, sweetheart."

Daniel didn't care much for tv. It did make it easier to find something to say if anyone spoke to him in school, though, so most evenings he watched some half-heartedly, reading a book at the same time. Impossible missions. Heroes in space. Hockey matches. Brave doctors saving wounded soldiers. Cartoon people in brightly colored versions of life. It chased away some of the darkness and quiet from the small apartment. Daniel liked to fall asleep to the sound of voices, but he still hadn't gotten used to only hearing English. At first he'd asked his mother to speak to him in Arabic as he was trying to sleep. (_You can say anything. Translate the business news from the paper._) It had worked, but it made his mother look so sad he gave it up. Now he had the sound from the tv and the voices in his book. That would have to do.

SsSsS

Claire Jackson woke when her book nearly fell from her hand. She always knew immediately where she was as soon as she woke up, sleep didn't really bring any consolation.

She fumbled for her glasses and her watch. Eleven pm. Daniel had fallen asleep curled up in his corner of the couch, book in his lap and glasses askew. She picked up his book. "Le comte de Monte Cristo" Daniel must know it by heart after all these years. She could hear Mel reading it to him. Mel had actually been quite good at French but he'd had an unmistakably American accent. She used to tease him about it and he'd retaliate by accusing her of being a snob and threaten death by tickling.

Daniel's hair fell over his ears and forehead. He was here, alive, growing up right in front of her. He needed a haircut, winter clothes, skates. Needed her.

"Come on, darling, time to get to bed." It took her a while to coax Daniel to his feet. They stumbled to his room where he fell face down on the bed and fell back asleep at once. Claire wrestled off his jeans and tucked him in. Daniel made an inarticulate snuffling sound and burrowed under the comforter. Claire went to close the window and see if she could turn up the heat. She was always cold these days.

Daniel turned in bed and spoke in his sleep, his tone almost conversational. "I want … tomorrow" and then he was still again. She wondered if he had made any friends in school.

Claire folded Daniel's jeans and tidied his room a little, not that it was really messy. She paused, looking at his desk. He had a globe with a light inside, turned so that when Daniel lay in bed he would see North Africa. Egypt.

Back in the living room Claire just stood and looked at the mess, absently rubbing her right arm, feeling the scars, willing the ache to go away. She gathered her papers and turned out the lights in the kitchen.

She felt like crying, she always did in the evening. The days went by in a dream-like haze, her surroundings, America itself still unreal to her. When Daniel slept she felt lonely.

On an impulse she picked up the pile of clean laundry and carried it into her bedroom. Inside there was little more than her bed and boxes of books she couldn't bring herself to unpack. She had no need for her Egyptology stuff now, teaching French to bored college girls who were passing time until they could get married. The bed felt too big and empty. She put the laundry on the bed and went back into the living room. She slept better on the couch anyway.

When she was rolled up in the blanket she reached for her book again. Durrell, the old cynic, would get her through the night. Justine, Nessim, Mountolive … she felt like they were the only friends she had left. Closer to her than her father, currently deep in some South American jungle, unable to offer her a job even after she'd begged him to take her on as a secretary. Closer than the old friends from the digs in Egypt. She had no place there either. Mel had been the one to take her along, as long as he led the dig he'd been able to have an on-site linguist if he wanted to. Things were different now.

The words on the page were dancing in front of her eyes now. She never looked at the title page anymore. The lines in Mel's messy scrawl were burned into her mind. *Beautiful Claire with all my love, Mel*

She kept reading until her eyes refused to stay open. Some nights sleep wouldn't come at all, and the next day people and sounds had blurred edges. She almost preferred those days, the emptiness and pain were blurred, too.

But she'd sleep tonight. With her eyes closed she was almost back in the tiny apartment in Alex where they lived during the winters when the digs were closed. There hadn't been a right angle anywhere in the place and the plumbing was temperamental.

Mel was in her dreams some nights. It just made waking hurt even more.

SsSsS

Daniel woke up and found that his mom had slept on the couch again. She was completely still, but he could tell she was awake. He didn't have to look to know she'd been crying.

End


End file.
